And it looks like something broke the superlinear cache. Even with atomic matching this pattern/string combination goes quadratic, as nothing anchors the start of the pattern. Without the atomic matching its worse. Im not sure what the deal is with $re++ either. I would have expected that to have similar performance to (?>$re)+, its possible thats actually a bug. Ill have to think about it.

Oh, and dont use benchmarks from a debugging perl. Depending on the code path you go through variable amounts of debugging goo, so using a debugging perl, especially a 5.9.x or later version will not give useful results even comparing features.

Ah, thanks for that last remark, I'll keep it in mind for future testing.

However, I double-checked and while I thought I remembered that -Dusedevel implied -DDEBUGGING, it doesn't seem so*. Hence, the 5.11 I used for the above results was no debugging build. Sorry for the confusion!